Congratulations to Bravetree!

I wanted to give a congratulatory message out to my friends over at Bravetree productions (makers of the very cool Indie game Think Tanks) for two great accomplishments that they have made this week:

1) Think Tanks for Xbox Live Arcade has shipped and now allows you to play one hell of a cool game on one hell of a cool console. You should definately go and download the demo of this game today, its a lot of fun!

2) They accomplished the indie dream and have been brought into long-time friends and technology developers GarageGames. So basicly it means that you have the talented game creators of Bravetree driving GarageGames' technology to deliver some kick ass products.

This definately makes the job of making a competing product a bit more difficult, but I think most of us are up to the challenge :)

Stike Averted! The Industry is Saved

I am probably still bitter and bummed out over the death of my neice on Tuesday but am I the only one who thought that this whole "Voice Actor" issue with games was incredibly lame?

Here you have a bunch of voice actors, and their respective unions, bitching and bemoaning how they should get residuals from the games that they are paid to lend their voice to, when the very people who actuall make the game that we all love and enjoy get jack all. It makes perfect sense to me doesn't it? A voice actor speaks into a microphone and says a few lines and they are done, a best it's maybe a few days worth of work. Yes I know that not everyone has a great voice and is able to do this, but the same is true for the programmers, artists, audio engineers, QA, design, marketing (and many others) spend at least a year of their lives toiling day in and day out sacrificing their family and physical & mental health to make a great game.

To top it all off the union that represents these people wanted to strike and not do any additional games work but failed to get 3/4 majority (instead they got somewhere over 50%). Can you just imagine the result if they had striked and not agreed to a paltry $675(usd)/hr? Let's think about it for a second...

Did you come to the same conclusion I did? That's right no one would give a dammed. I guess I should be thankful that there are some union members that had some intelligence to realize that this was a lame issue to strike over, but I have to wonder about the majority that let their greed get the best of them.

As a side comment I have to worry exactly what BS would have come of this if the games industry was unionized. I would bet that to keep our "union brothers" happy we would have capitulated and given in allowing these guys because its quite obvious that their hard work greatly over shadows the work of the other 40+ people that worked on the AAA game that they were hired to lend their voice to.

To me it's just another sign though that Unions are no longer here to protect the worker but to appease the greed of those that control the union. Screw the idea of unionizing the games industry, it's lame and retarded and IMHO driven by a select few wanting to be greedy versus actually wanting to ensure that a company like EA doesn's screw its employees over or ensuring that ourselves and our families have the safety and security we need.

Death in the Family

Today has ended up being a pretty crappy day. My brother and his wife had their baby today which normally would be a great thing, but unfortunately the baby girl had problems breathing from the moment that she was born and later died a few minutes later of a Cardiac Arrest in the hospital. So things overall suck and there isn't much that one can do right now but wait, think about how things could have been and try to move on, but it's probably going to take a while though. So if I am offline for a while don't be too surprised.